Click here for more information about
Balrog's other fighting game appearances.

As a boxer, Balrog has no kick attacks. All of the kick buttons
make Balrog perform other kinds of punches. When Street Fighter
II was localized in America, Capcom was afraid of a lawsuit
from Mike Tyson over a character with his likeness and a similar
sounding name (Mike Bison).

Balrog was once a great boxing champion and prize fighter. He
was banned from boxing for permanently injuring his opponents, as
well as using his illegal maneuvers (particularly elbow blows,
headbutts and even waist-down attacks), so he joined the Shadoloo
criminal organization, and worked his way up from the bottom,
eventually becoming Bison's enforcer. While running errands for M.
Bison (Vega in Japan), he killed Dhalsim's elephant with a single
Gigaton Punch. In one mission, Balrog was sent to terminate Birdie.
Although he did not know why, Balrog went anyway. Birdie told him
about the Psycho Drive, and Balrog agreed to help him find it,
thinking he could make money from it. When the Psycho Drive
exploded, Balrog realized that he had not been paid recently. When
M. Bison was killed at the hands of Akuma, ownership of Shadoloo
was transferred to the former prize fighter. Unfortunately, he
ended up running the entire organization into the ground in no
time. After the fall of Shadaloo, Balrog ended up working as a
Casino security guard in Las Vegas to get by, until much later,
whereupon he received his position back and was tasked with
guarding M. Bison's new clones.